Ending systems of death

The violent lessons of 2024

Robert Brooks Jr.

This newsletter began in a moment of horror – the news of Robert Brooks Jr.’s gruesome murder at the hands of prisoner guards in Marcy, NY, and the video released a few days ago by Attorney General Letitia James. Afro News describes the brutal moment as follows:

“The footage shows officers punching and kicking Robert L. Brooks on Dec. 9 in a medical examination room at the prison just hours before he was pronounced dead. During the encounter, the 43-year-old’s hands are seen handcuffed behind his back the entire time. As he takes blow after blow, blood runs from injuries to his face. Brooks can be seen taking forceful punches, provoked by nothing more than him sitting on the edge of a medical gurney, trying to catch his breath and calmly speaking. He was later taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead in the early morning hours of Dec. 10.”

I wish this was unfamiliar territory. I wish none of us had to know these events, of which we know only a fraction. The truth is that, despite the repeated cycle of state atrocities released on video, which become social phenomena and focus mass outrage, we see the exceptions. The norm is for these beatings and murders and brutalizations to happen quietly; they are the hum and the routine of violent institutions of incarceration across the country. Once in a great while what happens behind bars, in these dark places deliberately hidden away in small prison towns, explodes beyond the confines of the prison cell. Then we get a cycle of discussion and disgust, and very little change. After a time the quiet returns, and the mundane daily violence continues. In fact, it never stopped.

Photo by Nadine E on Unsplash

The routine violence of U.S. prisons is why I balk at the response of the New York Correctional Officers union to the murder of Robert Brooks, repeated in article after article, that says what "we witnessed is incomprehensible to say the least and is certainly not reflective of the great work that the vast majority of our membership conducts every day." The word “incomprehensible” is, unfortunately, the perfect public relations vehicle in this scenario. Most people who see video of a man sadistically beaten to death for no reason will find the act incomprehensible. The level of dehumanization and casual violence that you have to adopt to participate in such a gruesome killing is virtually impossible for most of us to understand.

The corrections officers are hoping that you and I, in our disbelief, accept the explanation that they too cannot fathom their co-workers' brutality. But the truth is that they see and participate in such violence every day, all under the umbrella of mass structural violence against inmates. Fifty-three years ago, the deadliest prison riot in America took place – also in upstate New York. 43 people were killed, prisoners and guards, and all but four died under fire from law enforcement. The men sent in to end the riot killed their own as well as the inmates, and lied about it for years. And documents that weren’t unsealed until 2015 revealed “accounts of torture, burns and sexual abuse by prison officials” after the prison uprising, according to The Guardian.

The article linked above should be read with caution. The descriptions of sexual violence, and other forms of violence after the inmates attempted to rise up, knowing they would lose in many ways but also determined to change their conditions, are nightmarish. We should realize by now that people pushed to extremes will rebel, and as a prisoner says in one excellent documentary about the prison says, “Attica was fear.” Inmates describe a litany of abuses, both systemic and individually sadistic, leading up to the takeover. Malnutrition, racist abuse, beatings and more defined life for the mostly Black inmates under the entirely white guard corp. 53 years later, Robert Brooks Jr. is brutally murdered at an upstate New York facility.

I could write to you more about abolition, about the role of state forces, and how when we hear their violence described as “incomprehensible” and “senseless” by corrections officers and the Governor, we should know that this is just the most egregious tip of the spear. Behind this killing is endless violence deemed smaller, deemed acceptable, deemed the way those who violate the law ought to be treated, despite how it helps almost no one, hurts millions, and by just about every metric harms society. Well, it helps a select few. As with most systemic violence, there are a handful of beneficiaries and countless sufferers.

This year is concluding with lessons about the relationship between individualized violence and structural violence. We are taught in numerous ways that violence is bad, and even more importantly, that is the end of the lesson. Hurting people is bad. Then we see someone murder the CEO of the biggest health insurer in the U.S. Of course every politician and corporate media outlet and powerful person of any variety denounces the killing. Then they call anyone applauding the killing sick and twisted. And all the while there’s a conspicuous vacuum; none of them can answer why it’s okay that Brian Thompson oversaw a company that killed thousands and thousands of people through its policies. That’s because there is no justification for the harms of the for-profit health insurance system. But you can’t say that, because it might be construed as justifying shooting this CEO, which is the wrong kind of killing.

Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash

The brutal beating of a prisoner is different. It’s easy for the powerful to denounce. These guards crossed a line when they mercilessly beat Robert Brooks. But of course the prison system as a whole crosses no lines; it’s part of the line. It composes a vital section of the line that protects ‘order’ and safety and law, or so we’re told. Yet we’re asked to ignore the immense violence of prisons themselves. We’re told to ignore families being ripped apart, people being forced into solitary confinement and its attendant psychological damage, beatings and rapes and even killings within prison walls. Then we’re told to demonize folks subjected to this treatment. We’re told to believe that a system that takes struggling people, abuses them, and then, eventually, releases them back into society is good for our safety, and for the fabric of society.

To state the obvious, none of this protects us. Prisons are part of holding a line that was never meant to protect us, much like for-profit healthcare was never intended primarily to help us stay or get healthy. All of it is intended to preserve a violent status quo and the profits of a small group of people. Each and every one of us is more likely to be incarcerated than we are to be a billionaire, just as we’re far more likely to be denied our health insurance claims than we are to be President.

I chose to write to you about this today both because the family of Robert Brooks Jr. deserves whatever weak approximation of justice they can get, and because we need to update our understanding of violence, urgently. The condition of the United States has been, for some time, the wanton use of violence against those deemed expendable or second-class: prisoners, racial minorities, and the impoverished chief among them. The ruling class deems this systemic violence necessary to maintain the capitalist order. But now we have overt fascists taking power, and they are even more willing to use violence, both in policy and in extra-legal forums ranging from militias to individual acts of terror.

Photo by David Todd McCarty on Unsplash

So, in 2025, our understanding of violence needs to grow far beyond the most extreme acts of the state. It was, in many ways, the daily, mundane violence of our systems that gave rise to fascism. And fascism is a response from corporate America and the far-right that says we must double down on violence to maintain these systems, particularly capitalism but also white supremacy, patriarchy, and more.

We must fight back, but we also must present a vision, and work to enact it, that strips away violent systems of exploitation. Simply refuting MAGA, and trying to get back to the time before their rise, is wildly insufficient. What we might think of as normal laid the foundations for this moment. Neoliberalism and a weak democracy gave us fascism. A system that grinds people down for profit, discards entire regions and countless people when they are no longer useful to the profit system, the commodification of health care and housing and life itself gave us this moment. So we must think bigger. Heading into a new year, a year that will undoubtedly be filled with immense difficulty, we must have a vision that can see us through. We must have a vision of a society without the violence of police, of prisons, without workplaces where bosses let workers die on the job.

We must hold a vision of this better future as we fight the daily battles to come. That means short-term organizing fitting into a bigger picture of the long-term struggle to build new organizations, new movements, and a new way of doing politics and economics. Are we simply fighting back against each of Trump, Elon & Co.’s moves, or are we working to bring people into the struggle? Are we only reactive, or are we proactive in creating institutions that can counter fascism over the long haul? Are we building up the capacity to wield power, to care for one another, to move toward a world not governed by an insatiable hunger for profits? It’s going to be a long year, but it’s often darkest before the dawn, and in the darkness we can forge a better alternative than all that’s been presented so far. This is not just lofty idealism, it’s a real desire to win us all a better world. So, let’s get to work. Solidarity.